Advice on Writing Female Characters
A reader from a few years ago offers some writing advice, which I decline. I thought the exchange worth repeating:
“…a good practice might be to examine your female character as if she were a male character…”
This is precisely what I shall never do: the idea, if you will forgive me, is absurd. Allow me to suggest an opposite tack: if you can examine your female character as if she is a male character and detect no difference in the presentation, you are not portraying the character correctly.
Men and women are radically and fundamentally different; but even if they were not, society should acculturate them to be as different as possible in dress, deportment, and even language, so as to increase the differences hence increase the drama and romance of life. Unisexuality is misery.
When I examine the women I know in real life as opposed to the picture of womankind the feminists wish to impart, I do not find any hungering to enter the rat race and be a good provider for her husband and children-in-daycare, to crush their enemies see them driven before them, and to hear the lamentation of their women, which I see in the real men I really know.
I have met many bitter career women and very few bitter career men. I have met many women who, when the moment came to leave the work force and raise babies, were delighted beyond words at the chance. There was one young lady I once worked with every day who, when she announced she was retiring from Cube Hell to see to domestic life, someone joked “so are you going to end up in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant?” She smiled not just joyfully but radiantly and said, “Oh, God, I hope so, yes! I can’t wait!”
Perhaps she was kidding, but it did not look like kidding to me.
Now, I admit this is not a scientific sampling, and perhaps more women buy FORBES than buy MODERN BRIDE magazine. Perhaps as many girls read Execution novels starring mob-smasher Mack Bolan as read Harlequin romances with flowing-haired Fabio on the cover. All I can say is that I have not met such women.
Nor have I seen a single romance cover where the man is swooning over the woman’s brawny yet cruelly handsome arm, or kneeling and clutching her brawny yet cruelly handsome leg. Make of that what you will.
Why the important work of raising the next generation is regarded as demeaning and low, whereas the unimportant work of trenching a ditch or driving a truck or shuffling papers or pushing electrons through a computer is regarded both as dignified and requiring intelligence is a mystery.
No one has been able to explain this paradox to me. The closest thing to an explanation I ever got was blithering cultural-Marxist nonsense about power, empowerment, powering up power, and powerlusting power-seeking. The poor fools did not realize that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
In any case, I shall never write any stories supporting this false Marxistoid narrative. I think telling women that careers will make them happy is a lie, and that nurturing new life is unrewarding is a lie. I think telling women that they should feel the same vainglorious glee at smashing open the skull of an enemy with a hammer as a man feels is a lie. Telling women equality means entering the workforce is a lie.
Telling them to mistrust men and not to rely on them for support is tantamount to telling them not to get fully married but only partly married, to hold back her free and equal inner self, sterile and remote from her bridegroom, and this is not merely bad advice, but a sure-fire formula for misery and divorce.
I do think that domestic life is not for every woman. Taking the vows and donning the habit is an honorable option.